Best Practices For Posting to Instagram from a Mac

Whether you are an aspiring influencer, or a consumer brand wanting more customers, Instagram is an amazing platform. With over 1 billion monthly active users and an organic reach that surpasses Facebook, it is a great way to cultivate an audience of fans.

For everyone else, who isn’t an influencer jetting off to Coachella or Burning Man, Instagram is a cool place to share our lives with others, through pictures, videos and live Stories. One downside of Instagram is that it was designed as a mobile-first app.

Although that normally isn’t an issue, as you can still browse and engage with content on a Mac or PC, there isn’t a way through the web-app (browser) version to post images or videos. Mac users are often more creative than most, so the ability to post to Instagram from a Mac would be useful. That way, you can edit an image or video taken on a professional camera before posting. In this article we share some useful best practices for posting to Instagram from a Mac.

How to post to Instagram from a Mac?

Before you post anything, you need to decide what you are posting. Have you got pictures or videos ready to post? What you post on Instagram depends on your style, what you’ve been doing recently and if you’ve got enough followers, what they expect from your timeline and personal aesthetic.

People often wonder when to post on Instagram? According to a Latergramme study of 61,000 posts, the best times are 5pm and 2am EST. Wednesday and Saturday are the best days for online engagement on Instagram. Another study, this time by Later – an Instagram marketing platform – of 12 million posts, found the best times were between 9am and 11am EST.

Although, again, posting times, what you post and the hashtags or geotags used will have an impact on your own engagement metrics, so everything is relative. It depends on your audience, and where they are in the world and when they are active on Instagram. It also comes down to the quality of the content, organic reach and how well – or not – what you post can overcome algorithmic challenges.

When it comes to posting to Instagram, the easiest way is to use a macOS Instagram uploader app. One such app is Flume, which you can get as part of a Setup subscription. You can give it a try with a 7-day free trial and download the app.

Once Flume is downloaded and connected to Instagram, you can use it to upload edited full-size pictures, videos and social media posts. Click on the camera icon and follow the uploader process to publish what you want. It really is as simple as that. Enjoy browsing Instagram on your phone or tablet, while being able to post high-quality professionally edited content using your Mac. Get the best of both worlds.

Another workaround to this problem is to trick Instagram into thinking you are posting from a mobile device. You can only do this using the native macOS Safari browser, but it can be a useful time saving trick.

1.Open the Safari browser (on your Mac)

2.Go to Preferences and then within that, Advanced

3.Now login to Instagram

4.Go back to Safari Preferences and click Develop (in the Menu bar)

5.Click on User Agent and then Safari iOS 11.4 iPhone (or any of the newer operating systems)

6.Now refresh your web browser to ensure that Instagram automatically loads the mobile version, which includes the ability to upload content.

Whichever workaround you use, both make it as easy to post on Instagram as you can on a smartphone. Some social media management tools – for professionals in the marketing industry – also allow scheduling and posting to Instagram too, after years of this not being possible. We hope these workarounds have been useful: time to step your Instagram game up with content edited on a Mac!

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